Site Mobile Navigation

Amazing Child, Typical Grown-Ups

Quvenzhané Wallis in "Beasts of the Southern Wild."Credit
Ben Richardson

PARK CITY, Utah — Now in its 28th edition, the Sundance Film Festival has eased into a mellower groove, hallelujah and pass the parka. Despite the predictable hazards and hassles, like slip-sliding on black ice and waiting for shuttles in the frigid cold, it no longer is the nightmare it had become back when Paris Hilton and frat types descended. The economic downturn plays a part — there are fewer self-important industry players crowding the scene — as does the affable presence of the festival’s director, John Cooper, who took over in 2009.

These remain uncertain times in the independent-film world, as distributors continue to try to seduce ticket buyers away from the mainstream. Both Magnolia Pictures and IFC Films, for instance, now routinely show movies through video on demand before putting them on the big screen. That they continue to use brick-and-mortar theaters indicates that this strategy works for them, though it’s difficult to know what it means for the future of cinema. Audiences clearly still want to see indie movies in theaters (or at least festivals: last year’s Sundance lured some 45,000 attendees), but getting them to pony up for smaller, starless work remains tough, as suggested by the $1.3 million domestic box-office haul for “Another Earth,” which was picked up at Sundance 2011 by Fox Searchlight.

The evolution of the studio-dependent Fox Searchlight in the past few years has been nothing if not surprising. When Searchlight was led by Peter Rice (he now runs entertainment for Fox television), it released movies that were so alike — quirky and cute were operative descriptors for titles like “Juno” and “Garden State,” which invariably came with head-bobbing alt-rock soundtracks — that its lineup came close to a house style. Under the guidance of Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula, Searchlight since 2009 has edged into more challenging terrain, with titles like “Shame” and “Black Swan.” It’s a risk that largely appears to be paying off, as witnessed by the announcement on Tuesday that one of its boldest recent releases, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” had been nominated for a best picture Oscar.

It’s hard not to think that Searchlight’s success with “The Tree of Life” helped sway the producers of the heavily courted “Beasts of the Southern Wild” to throw in with the company. The standout of this year’s Sundance and among the best films to play at the festival in two decades, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” isn’t an obvious studio-dependent title. Directed by Benh Zeitlin, who wrote the screenplay with Lucy Alibar, the film is a magical realist tale, as well as a hero’s journey, set in a gloriously mythologized part of southern Louisiana nicknamed the Bathtub. There, a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, a sensational find), lives in a state of grace and wonder with her hard-boozing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), amid wandering (and later cooked) chickens, stumbling drunks and rampaging creatures.

This is the first feature from Mr. Zeitlin, a Queens native who grew up in Westchester County, graduated from Wesleyan University and counts among his influences Mr. Malick, John Cassavetes and Emir Kusturica. After a stint working in the Czech Republic for another inspiration, the animator Jan Svankmajer, Mr. Zeitlin made his way, post-Katrina, to southern Louisiana, where he shot “Beasts” with a collective called Court 13. (“More of an idea than an organization,” as Mr. Zeitlin puts it, Court 13 takes its name from a Wesleyan squash court that he and some friends commandeered.) Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is hauntingly beautiful both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters, who live on the edge and perhaps somewhat in Hushpuppy’s head.

Nothing else at this year’s festival came close to stirring up the excitement and sense of discovery generated by “Beasts,” which predictably also inspired a minor critical backlash and worse. I heard one industry type wonder aloud if Hushpuppy was “retarded or just black and poor.” Happily for that fool, the festival was dominated by the familiar complement of drifty and droopy white young things haplessly bumping into the usual life milestones — divorce, death, desire — their every banality immortalized by handheld digital cameras. The light weight of such cameras no doubt accounts for the ubiquity of handheld cinematography, though in too many titles this approach has become a lazy tool for directors who seem to think that tripod-free camerawork equates realism.

Unlike the kind of violent trembling or jagged movements that characterize some such work and that can convey a tremendous sense of urgency, a feeling that something profound is at stake (as in “The Hurt Locker”), these tremulous visuals tend to suggest gentle, almost nervous concern. Do the directors who like to hover with the camera belong to Generation Helicopter, those children coddled by overly attentive parents? Whatever the case, there is often a tentative quality here, as if the directors were reluctant to commit strongly to anything on screen, including an image that doesn’t quaver. When the characters are similarly vague, as in So Yong Kim’s “For Ellen,” this visual signature can make good narrative sense.

A goateed, leather-jacketed Paul Dano stars in “For Ellen” as Joby, a rock ’n’ roller who believes that he’s on the edge of a breakthrough but needs the money from a pending divorce settlement to make it until he does. Much of the movie involves his trying to finalize that divorce while also facing the young daughter he abandoned. In the past, Ms. Kim’s storytelling has been so diffuse, borderline vaporous, that her movies (“In Between Days,” “Treeless Mountain”) have nearly slid off the screen. Mr. Dano, twitching and preening like a bottom-drawer Robert Plant, helps to give “For Ellen” some solidity (and jolts of energy), as does the somewhat stronger, more obvious story that in the end is about yet another younger person struggling with adult responsibilities.

Grown-ups behaving childishly or at least struggling with, or shrugging off, the trappings of adulthood is as much a familiar theme at Sundance as in the multiplex. The comic Mike Birbiglia assumed the role of both director and star to make “Sleepwalk With Me,” a fictionalized version of an autobiographical story that will be familiar to “This American Life” listeners and New York theatergoers. On the radio, Mr. Birbiglia’s story about his increasingly dangerous sleepwalking episodes — he didn’t just walk, he also dangerously meandered — enthralled. Here, though, the movie weighs too much in the direction of another guy who can’t commit, a tedious, trite turn for such an agreeably shambling, empathetic screen presence as Mr. Birbiglia, who’s best when he’s confessing straight into the camera.

Just as the festival started winding up, the latest bad news on women in the industry from the researcher Martha M. Lauzen hit: they made up only 5 percent of the directors of the 250 top-grossing domestic movies of 2011. Sundance has long been one of the few important film events where women enjoy enough of a high profile that it can be easy to forget how rotten it is for their sisters in the mainstream, on and off the screen. It’s no wonder that women like Brit Marling (who helped write and starred in “Another Earth”) and Rashida Jones, who starred in and helped to write this year’s “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” a charming, unapologetically mainstream romantic comedy, are taking their careers in their own hands.

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, “Celeste and Jesse Forever” doesn’t break any new narrative ground and isn’t trying to. Ms. Jones stars as Celeste, a hard-driven trend spotter who’s so amicably separated from her husband, Jesse (Andy Samberg), that they’ve continued to live on the same property. Frustratingly, Mr. Krieger tends to cut away every time the movie promises to go a wee deeper, but he’s smart enough to give Ms. Jones room to show how good she can be. And while there’s nothing overtly independent about the movie’s form or style, its sexual politics and especially its feminist finale are right on.

Messier, noisier and as enjoyable is Julie Delpy’s blended-family comedy “2 Days in New York,” her successful follow-up to “2 Days in Paris.” Making the most of her locations and a funny cast led by her and Chris Rock as an emotionally and psychologically believable, sexy couple, Ms. Delpy creates a utopian portrait of Obama’s America in which issues of white and black are at once ever present and almost (if never fully) beside the point of surviving some lovably quarrelsome French relatives. Mr. Rock’s performance as Mingus, a laid-back writer who likes to confide his familial and relationship woes to a cardboard cutout of the president, is particularly winning.

Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette,” an unfunny female comedy about a troika of hateful bridesmaids led by the reliable Kirsten Dunst, is clearly meant to exploit the “Bridesmaids” phenomena: women talk dirty, have bodily fluids and can turn a movie into a hit! Further under the radar though far more successful is “Middle of Nowhere,” a heartfelt, slow to build, slow to burn drama from Ava DuVernay about a young married woman, Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi), keeping body and soul together while her husband, Derek (Omari Hardwick), serves out his sentence in a California prison. Working with the terrific cinematographer Bradford Young, Ms. DuVernay fills her movie with long shots and meticulously framed images of casual beauty that reflect the quietly evolving inner life of her heroine.

A version of this article appears in print on January 28, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: At a Subtler Sundance, One Film Sparkles: Amazing Child, Typical Grown-Ups. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe